We Won't Feel a Thing (16 page)

“What
is
that?” said Riley. He took the tissue plugs out of his nose, careful not to look at the blood.

Rachel and Riley got out of the car and ventured closer. Cringing, Rachel stepped over an eviscerated book and turned over the sack with the forked end of a thick twig. A large DERT logo was printed on the underside, along with:

“Okay,” said Riley. “I’m officially flipping out.”

“Don’t.”

“This is
crazy
.”

“It’s your parents.” Rachel picked up the
DERT@Home Pocket Guide
, now waterlogged and mysteriously stained. “How crazy can it get?”

A wordless bellow came from deep in the house, possibly the basement.

Riley tapped Rachel. “Let’s go around back.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why?”

“We’ll have to crouch behind hedges together.”

“So?”

“Crouching behind hedges is inherently romantic.” She folded her arms. “Plus it looks like rain again.”

“Come on.”

“No.”

“I’m worried about them, Rach.”

Rachel bowed her head. She turned the
Pocket Guide
over and over in her hands.

“We’ll spy for five minutes,” she said. “To make sure they’re okay.”

“Define ‘okay.’”

“Not holding obvious murder weapons.”

He nodded.

“I won’t touch you,” said Riley. “I promise.”

“I won’t either,” said Rachel.

They didn’t shake on it.

The Woodlawn house was built on a slope, so the basement room was only half underground. The sliding glass doors opened on a square brick patio enclosed in tall arborvitae, chewed ragged in spots by backyard deer. The Venetian blinds normally stayed drawn, especially when Mr. Woodlawn was attempting a new situp regimen or Mrs. Woodlawn was hashing out ways to refresh her eighth unpublished novel
(The Bowdlerist’s Daughter)
with a third-act plot twist.

Today the blinds were partly open. Just enough to reveal the following: Anne and Ed in saggy underwear, tussling in a pit made of plywood, plastic sheeting, and a giant inflatable pool filled with DERTMUD™.

Riley’s knuckles went white on his knees. He watched his mother fling mud at his father’s bare chest. She raised her fists with a whoop, as if New York had just phoned with a book deal.

“I…” He worked his mouth helplessly.

Rachel rifled though the
DERT@Home Pocket Guide
, hunting for the answer to
Why have they lost their minds?
She found it on Page 76.

“Ugh.” She shuddered as she read.
“Uggggggggggh
.”

“What?” Riley’s shoulders stiffened.

She passed the book to him. He scanned the paragraph under the header that said
Your Recovery Ring.

Riley set the book down and sat on his heels. A light rain pattered the grass.

“My parents,” he observed, “just built their own mud wrestling pit.”

Rachel squinted through a hole in the greenery. “It looks that way. Yes.”

“This might be the worst thing that ever happened.”

As if to prove him wrong, Mr. and Mrs. Woodlawn shuffled to each other on their knees. Slowly, locking tentative arms around each other’s backs, they began to kiss.

“I…wouldn’t look at this if I were you,” said Rachel.

Riley jumped up. He found a hole a safe distance from Rachel’s and peered through it. Still entangled, Mr. and Mrs. Woodlawn had fallen to one side. They groped each other with desperate abandon, like honeymooners caught in a mudslide.

Rachel and Riley marinated in horror for a full fifteen seconds.

Then Riley started to laugh.

It was such a shock that Rachel laughed too: first a loud yelp that startled her, then a stream of softer spasms behind her cupped hand.

“Wh-what—” Riley waggled all his fingers, grimacing. “What the
bloody hell
are they doing?”

“He never gave you the Talk?” said Rachel.

“Not
that
talk.”

“Well, you see,” said Rachel, “sometimes, when a narcissistic failed writer and a well-meaning schlub resent each other very, very much, they—”

“Do not finish that sentence.” He covered his face.

“It’s time you faced facts, Riley.”

He looked at her through his fingers. “What?”

“Your parents…” She put a hand over her heart. “They
might
make a baby tonight.”

“Uggh!”

“Do you want a baby brother or a baby sister?”

Riley shoved her over. She kicked at his leg. A fresh wave of laughter swept over them.

“I think they’ll name it Gary!” he said.

“Gary Gannon Woodlawn.”

“He’ll be born with an epic beard.”

“They’ll make him wear pelt diapers.” They gasped for breath. Rachel choked on her gum and swallowed it, which made them laugh harder. They laughed for so long they didn’t notice when Mrs. Woodlawn stood up in the Recovery Ring, and cocked an ear toward the sliding glass door.

She cracked it open. Rachel and Riley froze behind the hedges.

“Hello? Who’s out there?”

Riley clutched Rachel’s arm.

“—Ed, it’s those Watson boys again, I know it,” said Mrs. Woodlawn. “I’m coming out!”

Inside the basement room, Mr. Woodlawn said, “Honey…at least put this on.” Mrs. Woodlawn turned back to accept a pink terrycloth robe.

“C’mon,” Rachel tugged Riley’s shirt, pointing at the left side of the house. “That way!”

They scurried away. The glass door screeched open. Mrs. Woodlawn clomped out, shouting “Show yourselves!” Startling, Riley tripped over a gardening bench and scattered four six-packs of petunias that no one had gotten around to planting. Rachel helped him up, pulled him away from the mess. Right before Mrs. Woodlawn turned the corner, they ducked into the shed and drew the door shut behind them.

The storage shed, a frequent source of tension since Mr. Woodlawn had installed it on the side of the house and not in “the logical place” around back, was a crude replica of the Woodlawn home: white with black shutters and crooked window boxes. It was crammed with memories. The rusty mower four-year-old Riley rode with his father, the lopsided picnic basket Rachel and Riley lugged to Solomon’s Pond, the collapsible pool chair Mrs. Woodlawn pointedly called a
chaise longue
instead of a
chays lounge
. The only free space was in the corner, by one of the small grubby windows.

Rachel and Riley squeezed in, hearts pounding in the dark. Rachel squinted through the window grime. Mrs. Woodlawn was stalking the premises, leveling threats at the bushes that bordered their yard.

“If you little thugs think you can spy on the neighbors just because the Venetian blinds are open, you’ve got another thing coming!”

Riley let a giggle escape. Rachel bumped him with her hip.
Another think coming,
she corrected.

“And if I catch you back here I’ll call your parents and tell them they raised a couple of—” She spied the overturned bench. “Oh, for heaven’s
sake
!”

Riley jostled Rachel for a glimpse. “What’s she doing?”

“Picking up like, eight hundred petunias. Nice work.”

They were shoulder to shoulder now. They stayed absolutely still. Mrs. Woodlawn moved with excruciating deliberation, realigning the flowers according to color; her newfound tolerance for mayhem did not, apparently, extend to petunias. The rain picked up. Cold sheets of water streamed down the panes. They shivered and longed for the clear umbrella, folded and snapped in the safety of their kingdom.

Mrs. Woodlawn squelched away and vanished.

“Rach,” whispered Riley.

“Yeah.”

“We’re stuck in a shed.”

“Mm-hm.”

“A very, very small shed. In a summer storm.”

“I know where we are.”

“Remember—”

“Yeah.”

They didn’t have to talk. They had the same memories. Ten years old, tossed from the house after Saturday breakfasts while Mrs. Woodlawn resumed work on her difficult epic,
Agamemnon Cried
. They’d race on bikes and make bottle rockets and play Baseball for Two in the backyard, but by late afternoon they’d always end up in the shed, pretending they were eighteen and living in Suite 7B. They’d read each other stories by flashlight: silly mysteries, grown-up fantasy novels, proper old fairy tales with bloody, grim endings. And they’d make up their own stories, Bob and Athena ticking on the tool-bench table between them.

They turned to face each other. Riley brushed Rachel’s cheek with the back of his hand.

“How did this happen?” Rachel said. “Four days ago, we were normal. Everything was normal.”

“I don’t think we were ever normal.”

A light popped on in the Watsons’ house next door.

“If I’d grown up there,” said Rachel. “Like, twenty yards away…”

“Then what?”

“This would be cute,” she said. “I’d be the girl next door.”

“You still are. Door’s just closer.”

“Not funny.”

“Go ask if they’ll adopt you. Since my parents never—”

“Ri.”

“You’re right. It wouldn’t solve things.” He moved close, touched his lips to her ear. “We’d still be leaving each other.”

Their eyes began to itch. They thought of their visions, the interrupted kisses. They felt their fingers lace together.

“One time,” said Riley. “We could kiss one time.”

“I don’t think—”

“It could fix everything. It could be so weird and awkward that we’d never want to do it again.”

Rachel recalled evidence from sitcoms and movies. She nodded slowly. “That’s actually possible.”

“Right?”

“The attraction could be theoretical. In practice, it could be—”

“A disaster.”

“So, not a kiss. An experiment.”

“For science,” he said.

“For science,” she said.

Thunder rumbled so close the shed door rattled. Their fingers unlaced. Their arms slid around each other.

Riley conducted the first experiment. It was a beach-cottage kiss, made of equal parts sweetness and terror.
Our first kiss. Our only kiss.
He curled his hand softly into her hair, rested his thumb beside her ear as he leaned in.
It’ll be over in two seconds. Before I even know what’s happening.
He made himself log every detail the second he touched his lips to hers. She tasted like green apples. Her neck appeared to be ticklish. Her wet hair smelled like wood shavings in a clean hamster cage. He made frantic field notes, as if analyzing the kiss would make it last longer. He tried very hard not to levitate.

They disconnected lips, still touching everywhere they could manage.

“What’s the verdict?” whispered Riley.

“Not weird,” said Rachel. “Disturbingly the opposite of weird.”

“Maybe the results are skewed.”

“Because it was the first time?”

“And we were being like, overly sweet.”

“Let’s try it once more,” said Rachel.

“Okay,” said Riley. His thumb grazed her lips. “Try not to be sweet.”

A shadow slanted across her face.

“I won’t.”

Rachel grabbed Riley’s ripped shirt and slammed him against the shed wall. Her kiss was the middle paragraph on page 147 of
The Heart Hath No Reason
, the
express-elevator-to-ecstasy
kiss marked with two purple stars by Florence or Dorothy Howe. She was Frederic, not Constanze.
Wanton, devouring kiss,
she thought, snarling her fingers in his curls.
Conquering
.
Plundering.
She went wild with hot fierce words, crushing him close as she kissed him, raking his back with her tough bitten nails. She felt the exact moment when she made him stop worrying, when his terror hardened into lust and his hands came alive on her, filled up with her power and ready to return it. He pushed back from her, seized her shoulders. She dared him with her eyes. He reversed their positions, swung her around and crashed her against the door and pulled her face to his again. She closed her eyes.
Loins of liquid fire,
she thought, and then she stopped thinking at all.

They gasped apart. They had to breathe. Riley held Rachel’s face. Rachel held Riley’s wrists. The world was spinning, walls and door and rain and windows all in a sparkling blur.

“We can stop,” said Rachel. She felt golden bars growing thick on the windows, trapping her here. “We have to stop.”

“I don’t think we can.”

“We can control this.”

“How?”

Rachel thought fast.

“Words,” she said. “Think of the most revolting words in the English language.”

Riley closed his eyes. “Moist?”

“Too obvious,” she said, kissing the bruise on his forehead, his swollen nose. “Everyone hates
moist
.”

“Squat.” He swallowed hard. “How about
squat
?”

“Good.
Suppurate
.”

“Slurp. Slacks.”

“Culottes.”

“Squelch.”

“Pustule.”

“Postulate.”

“Pejorative.”

“I like
pejorative,”
said Riley.

“You do?” said Rachel.

“It sounds like some kind of…fancy jam.”

“A sinister, medicinal jam.”

“They make it in some remote village…in the mountains…” Riley whispered, kissing her hairline, her cheek, her nose. “Where everyone has a secret.”

A crack of white lightning lit the shed. They startled apart.

When the dark settled over them again, Rachel leaned in and pressed one more long, articulate kiss on Riley’s lips. She traced his smile with her fingertips, the bottom curve of an anchor that would weigh her down in Puckatoe forever, in a sea of passion and grammatically incorrect pillows.